Selective breeding of giant freshwater prawn (Macrobrachium rosenbergii) in India: Response to selection for harvest body weight and on‐farm performance evaluation

Selective breeding of Macrobrachium rosenbergii with the aim of improving the growth rate was carried out for six generations at ICAR‐Central Institute of Freshwater Aquaculture, Odisha, India, in collaboration with WorldFish, Malaysia. Response to selection was estimated for harvest body weight using a fully pedigreed synthetic population. The data included 17,563 progeny, generated by 243 sires and 320 dams, over six generations with a nested mating structure. Harvest body weight was transformed to square root for analysis (g0.5). The response to selection for harvest body weight was estimated by two methods, referred to as I and II. With method I, the response was estimated from the difference in the mean breeding values between two consecutive generations, whereas with method II it was estimated from the difference in the least squares means of harvest body weight between the selection and control populations. The back‐transformed (to g) estimates of cumulative selection response after performing five generations of selection were 29.8% and 18.1% using methods I and II respectively. We also report the results of on‐farm evaluation of the 3rd and 4th generations of selectively bred M. rosenbergii in Odisha state. Both 3rd and 4th generations of selectively bred prawns outperformed the control stocks in all the tested sites.